Living the gracious life (think Joan Crawford)

July 06, 2008|By Jancee Dunn, NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

I used to give the worst get-togethers. I was a jittery mess, the sort of person who leapt to refill a glass and filled any conversational lull with nervous chatter. Of course, that was before I discovered "My Way of Life," Joan Crawford's 1971 guide to "gracious living," six years ago.

Her cheerfully deranged tips on entertaining, decorating and being "lovely to look at" became my secret weapon -- not to follow, but to read aloud at my parties. They were an instant hit.

Although I suppose I could have taken Crawford's advice on quelling anxiety. Before the big night, she instructed, one must rehearse. She approvingly cited a "superb hostess" who: "A hundred times practiced walking around her living room chatting with imaginary guests. Introducing strangers with just the right phrase to interest them in one another. She practiced moving gracefully, going to the door, offering canapes."

Thus began my collection of books on gracious living, those plucky, resourceful guides by celebrities or self-appointed lifestyle gurus that urged readers to infuse their everyday lives with panache! Elan! Flair!

Most were written between the gray flannel longueur of the Eisenhower administration and the nouveau riche froth of the Reagan years.

They take up a special shelf in my library, their hot pink and lime green spines and jazzy fonts forming a kind of swinging VIP area among the more austere tomes.

Full-time endeavor

Gracious living, the books make clear, is not a part-time endeavor. "Those who live graciously only when there is an audience present are phonies," Luella Cuming asserted in "The Luella Cuming Studio Course in Social Awareness, Poise and Gracious Living," from 1965. "One charming woman I know who lives alone wears her most beautiful chemises with high-heeled satin mules when she is alone. Sometimes she adds a pearl necklace or a zany cocktail hat."

It's true that I started collecting these books because their dated quality provided an easy chuckle. They begged to be satirized, as Amy Sedaris did last year with "I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence," which suggests innovative ways of introducing guests, like, "This is Barbara, she can't have children."

Is that any loopier, really, than some of the advice offered in "Sex and the Single Girl," written by the original Cosmo girl, Helen Gurley Brown? Her 1962 guide to being happily unmarried was actually for anyone in search of "taste and bezazz and verve and elegance."

Want a sexy apartment? Display "an enormous brandy snifter filled with dozens of loose cigarettes, opened whole packages of many brands and 'name' book matches from good restaurants." Having a group for brunch? Gurley Brown's program included Romanian Gypsy music, "chloroform cocktails" (boil 6 cups of coffee down to 1, add a fifth of gin and a quart of vanilla ice cream) and a naughty party game in which participants guess the different garments a guest is wearing, "no feeling or pinching allowed."

But the more I read these cheery books, the more I discovered that what I loved about them was their offbeat joie de vivre, their plucky contention that with wit, verve and maraschino cherries, anybody can live a fabulous life.

One can liven up a guest list as Crawford did, by mixing corporation presidents with a hairdresser, a physics professor, a professional jockey and a "bearded painter." Gurley Brown proposed inviting "all your beaux at once." Dorothy Rodgers, wife of the composer Richard Rodgers and a formidable New York hostess, described a novel approach in "My Favorite Things" (1964). She would phone the United Nations' hospitality committee and invite over delegation members from various countries. "In each of these," she wrote, "there are men and women longing to know more about us and our country."

The dictum of these vintage books was always "Be larger than life" -- markedly different from the message of modern-day tastemakers such as Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and Nate Berkus, who propose the more succinct "Be me." Instead of using what you have to jazz up your own world, you're absorbed wholly into theirs, thrown into a typhoon of duvet covers and nonstick skillets and T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase "Yum-o!"

Unabashedly eccentric

And so I retreat to the intimate company and enthusiasms of the older authorities, who weren't selling anything besides their books. Crawford, for example, could be her unabashedly eccentric self when telling readers to entertain while wearing a lovely gown (she often had her dressmaker fashion a matching turban and shoes). Or that hard chairs were perfectly fine for guests ("soft ones spread the hips"). Or that one should not serve a red vegetable next to a yellow one, which "looks unappetizing." I'll take Crawford's brisk command over Ray's gal-next-door demeanor any day.